It is common for computer users to access user-interactive information content over a communication network. The most prevalent example of this today involves the access of HTML (hyper-text mark-up language) files over the WWW (world wide web). User-interactive information content such as HTML files may be referenced over the communications network of interest with a file pointer which in the case of HTML files is referred to as a URL (universal resource locator). Typically, due to size limitations of the screen and/or window being used to view the user-interactive information content, only a portion of the content, which may include text and graphics for example, may be displayed at any instant. The amount of data content which may be viewed may depend upon physical limitations of the screen, or upon a limitation imposed due to the size of a window in which the contents are being viewed, this window size being selected by the user. The remainder of the content may be viewed by scrolling which causes different portions of the content to be displayed.
Conventional web browsing software has bookmarking functionality which allows the URL of frequently accessed WWW pages to be stored for convenient retrieval. It is frequently the case that within a page, it will be desirable to access a particular portion repeatedly. For example, some stock quote web pages feature several advertisements at the top, followed by some other useless information, and followed finally by the stock quotes appearing in a box. The box may appear in the same location within the page each time the page is accessed. Each time a user accesses the quotes, he must scroll down past the advertisements, and possibly widen or lengthen the window size to show the entire quote box.
Typically, these scroll positions and window sizes are stored only in temporary memory, and then erased from that memory when the windows are closed. This means that the user must perform the same scrolling and window-resizing each time a particular portion of a page is to be viewed. This problem is most severe in screens having physical screen-size limitations because the scrolling function may be slow.